Iran’s Strategy of Making Do

In a lot of ways the most newsworthy stuff in the latest WikiLeaks document dump is this Iran material discussed by Robert Farley that doesn’t particularly serve a specific political agenda. During the period when the Bush administration was making a lot of noise about Iranian activities in Iraq, a number of us regarded the speakers as not particularly credible. Julian Assange has now provided us with extensive documentation that such claims were, at a minimum, broadly and sincerely believed by the military personnel on the ground and not just a communications strategy.
Bottom line, as Farley says:
…to be clear, while I’d be reluctant to suggest that Iran had a moral or legal right to intervene in Iraq, I consider it utterly unsurprising that Iran did so; attempting to manage the political situation in a neighboring country, while simultaneously weakening a potential enemy, is something that countries do. Indignation about Iranian intervention is absurd.
Which brings us to Dexter Filkins’ article about how while the United States is attempting to achieve influence in Afghanistan through a military campaign that entails spending hundreds of billions of dollars, the Iranian government is just delivering millions in cash to Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff. That seems smart! And it seems noteworthy to me that the much tighter objective resource constraints faced by the Iranian national security apparatus seems to have inspired more creating thinking about high-productivity outlays.

Related

After canceling a planned announcement from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (due to security concerns), Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is now planning to appear via video link Tuesday morning at Wikileak’s tenth anniversary celebration in Berlin.
According to @wikileaks, Julian Assange will appear via video link at Berlin press conference on Tuesday AM

Submitted by Heat Street
Wikileaks has abruptly canceled a much-anticipated announcement on Tuesday, according to NBC News. The announcement had been expected to be founder Julian Assange’s long-promised document dump on Hillary Clinton.

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of U.S. dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the CIA to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

Submitted by Stefanie MacWilliams of PlanetFreeWill
In an interview on Fox News show Hannity, Julian Assange of Wikileaks has finally given a more definitive timeline to long awaited further “significant” information they will be releasing on Hillary Clinton before the November election.

Wikileaks has put the documents and emails obtained by hackers from Sony Pictures Entertainment in a searchable online database, the group announced Thursday. All 173,132 emails and 30,287 documents stolen from the movie studio late last year are now available for anyone to search, browse and view, founder Julian Assange said in a press release.

TORONTO — Syria is becoming a “major theatre of operations” for terrorists from around the world and “reinvigorating” the extremist cause, according to the 2013 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada.
Released on Thursday by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, the report said al-Qaeda and its regional affiliates remained Canada’s top threat but singled out Syria as an emerging problem.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has a sugar daddy, and its name is the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least it had a sugar daddy. For over ten years, American spies greased Karzai's palms about once a month with suitcases, backpacks and even plastic grocery bags full of cash.

To say nothing of false flag attack conspiracies, President Hamid Karzai recently jumped on the bandwagon with the most absurd one of all: recent Taliban bombings in Afghanistan were a result of American influence.

ALLOW me to also respond to my colleague's post defending the latest document-dump by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, in which he writesOrganisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.